Jim Larson Photography

Last week we had the opportunity to celebrate a birthday at our house and one of the people invited to the party was Riley who has some magical blue eyes.  I took several shots of her and found this one was to my liking.  I knew that I wanted to end up with a black and white image, but during the process I decided to keep the eyes blue and see how that would look.

Below is the resultant photograph:

This blue eyed image was created with Photoshop using the following steps:

• Open the image
• Duplicate the image into a new layer
• Convert the top layer to black and white
• Create a layer mask on the top image with nothing being masked (white mask)
• Using the paint brush tool set to the color black and the mask being selected as the item being changed, paint out the mask where the iris of the eyes are.  When you do this, the color of the lower image will show through.
• Riley’s eyes are so blue that it almost looked “creepy” so I selected the bottom (colored) layer and desaturated that layer just a bit to lessen the blueness of the eyes.

Pick out an image of your own and try this technique.  You’ll have fun.

Over the next few days I will show examples of how to take some photographs and make them even better.  Well, at least in my opinion they look better than the originals out of the camera.  Plus, my wife says so too, so that says something.  :-)

This last week I got to capture the wedding photos for a very nice couple.  In about 4 hours time, we had the wedding and an awesome reception at the bride’s parents house.  The back yard had white Christmas light in the hedges surrounding the yard.  This made for an awesome backdrop to the photos.

The image below is of the bride, showing the image as it came out of the camera and what I ended up presenting to the family.  Here are a few things that I did to make it look to my liking:

• Increased the overall exposure
• Modified the color balance so that white was white
• Increased the intensity some of the leaves in the background
• Added some vignetting to darken the corners just a bit to help bring the focus to the subject
• Did some minor touchup work on the brides face to make any blemishes a bit less conspicuous
• Did a minor push up on the bottom of the brides chin to make it more acceptable to her

Next time you have a photo that is nice, but not great, try some retouching ideas and see what you end up with.  Be sure you modify a copy of the original in case you go too far with your retouching.

Today I was blessed to be able to shoot wedding photos for a very handsome couple, Chris & Alyssa.  It is great fun to be part of capturing the moment when the two pledge themselves to each other as husband and wife. A goal of mine is to be able to give the couple a visual representation of their special event that they will cherish for years to come.

The venue was a very nicely renovated church in a suburb of St. Louis, MO. One nice thing about the church that I don’t often see very often is enough natural light to shoot in.  I still had to crank up the ISO to 1600 to give me a decent shutter speed, but both the Canon 5D MkII and Canon 7D are excellent at this setting. Adobe’s Lightroom 3 was great at minimizing any remaining noise.

Below are a few photos to highlight their wedding, starting off with Alyssa and her gals:

The beautiful bride, Alyssa:

The calm and cool husband, Chris:

The rings:

These guys had so much fun together.  As you can tell by the dancing, pointing, sunglasses, etc., they were not too serious at this point of the day.

Decorations:

Reception dinner:

Thank you Chris and Alyssa for giving me the privilege of being your photographer on your very special day.

Today I was taking photos of all the runners at the local YMCA hosted “Camel’s Back Duathlon.” Most everyone had already finished and I was waiting for the next person to come across the line with no one in site. For the past 30 minutes I had been looking for a good candidate for a small modeling job. Most runner shots were captured head to toe and you could definitely tell what they were doing. I wanted to see if I could tell a story without showing the big picture, so I asked a woman waiting for her friends to finish the race to help me with an experiment. I had her stand just under the finish line banner with her head at just the right angle. Then I snapped a nice closeup of her face and her very reflective glasses.

Do you like the different way of telling this athlete’s story?

I had a great time yesterday photographing our friends new puppy.  His name is Zappa and he was one of the most well behaved puppies I’ve seen. Zappa is an interesting mix of a Rat Terrier and a Chihuahua. Here is one of my favorite images from the photo session.

To see the rest of Zappa’s photos, click HERE to be redirected to my gallery site.

Enjoy!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This evening I had the opportunity for a senior portrait shoot.  The weather was great with a perfect temperature.  The sun was shining brightly through about as clear a sky as you could imagine.  I really prefer to have a slightly hazy sky as it turns the sky into a giant “softbox” wrapping the subject in soft sunlight.  That wasn’t to be today, as the sun was quite harsh, making it difficult to capture a perfect shot.

In many of my shots I used a flash to fill in the shadows.  In others, I had an assistant hold a large white reflector to fill in the shadows.  The shot pictured here was straight on sunlight with no added light, but I think it turned out quite nicely.  It took a little bit of  tweaking in the Adobe Lightroom software to get the exposure just right and to add a bit of darkening to the edges to bring your attention to the subject.

One of the aspects my photography business is shooting portraits.  My wife owns a music studio and a lot of students and parents coming through on a weekly basis.  This gives me an opportunity to show some of my work to potential customers.  As soon as I get this one printed, it will be up on the wall not only as advertising for me, but for this particular shot, as an inspiration to the music students.

The image was captured by placing the model on a white seamless paper background and a white, somewhat shiny floor.  After the image was copied to the computer, it was edited to take out any slight shading on the white background and to add a light brown gradient.  This was all done in Photoshop in about 10 minutes.

Now it is off to the printer for a nice 16×20 print!

I’ve missed a few opportunities to show off our little white dog, but couldn’t pass up this shot from her 2010 calendar.  Yes, we truly print out calendars every year of various photos taken of her.

This was a very simple setup from a technical point of view.  Alle was sitting on a black piece of plexiglass to give a nice reflection.  The background was black seamless paper and the lighting was a single 2×3 foot softbox.

When shooting pets, or any living subject for that matter, a good starting angle is to get at their eye level and experiment from there.  Make the subject look larger by shooting up at them, or smaller by shooting down.  I was pretty much at eye level with Alle.

Here is photo of our dog, Alle who is always a welcome gift under the tree.

After getting the last post together, I decided to see what else could be done with the photo.  I first converted it to black and white, then added a sepia tone to give it an old image look.  The last thing I did was to crop the image for more intimate view of my uncle.

Try making changes to some already favorite photos that you may have and you’ll find that there are many pictures inside the original photo.

Which do you like better?